Suchergebnisse

My thesis examines whether dialogue is useful for negotiating Indigenous rights and solving intercultural conflict over Indigenous claims for recognition within Australia. As a social and political practice, dialogue has been put forward as a method for identifying and solving difficult problems and for promoting processes of understanding and accommodation. Dialogue in a genuine form has never been attempted with Indigenous people in Australia. Australian constitutionalism is unable to resolve Indigenous claims for recognition because there is no practice of dialogue in Indigenous policy. A key barrier in that regard is the underlying colonial assumptions about Indigenous people and their cultures which have accumulated in various ways over the course of history. I examine where these assumptions about Indigenous people originate and demonstrate how they have become barriers to dialogue between Indigenous people and governments. I investigate historical and contemporary episodes where Indigenous people have challenged those assumptions through their claims for recognition. Indigenous people have attempted to engage in dialogue with governments over their claims for recognition but these attempts have largely been rejected on the basis of those assumptions. There is potential for dialogue in Australia however genuine dialogue between Indigenous people and the Australian state is impossible under a colonial relationship. A genuine dialogue must first repudiate colonial and contemporary assumptions and attitudes about Indigenous people. It must also deconstruct the existing colonial relationship between Indigenous people and government.

This study examines the place of in-home child care, commonly referred to as care by nannies, in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada since the 1970s. In contrast to childminding or family day care provided in the home of the carer, in-home care takes place in the child's home. Once considered the preserve of the wealthy, demand for in-home child care has increased in response to changes in the labour market and governments have, to varying degrees, incorporated it into wider policy settings. Governments increasingly justify expenditure on early childhood education and care (ECEC) by reference to the dual objectives of enhancing early childhood development and supporting parental employment. This liberal approach to social investment has been characterised by the introduction of market mechanisms in the delivery of ECEC, and other social care services. In-home care sits somewhat uneasily in the child development frame since providers typically are not required to meet the same standards as mainstream ECEC providers.Informed by theories of institutionalism and welfare regimes literature, the thesis uses the concept of 'care culture' to examine how in-home child care has been repositioned within ECEC and broader welfare state policies. It traces the emergence of in-home child care and compares how it is supported by government policy through funding and regulation. The research extends beyond the ECEC domain to consider how migration policy facilitates the provision of child care in the private home. Using a mix of qualitative research methods, including analysis of policy details in each country, government and sector documents and 60 interviews with key policy stakeholders across three countries, it shows how three liberal countries with common policy structures and discourses, in practice, developed different approaches to in-home child care. It illustrates the implications of these policies for families and care workers. It proposes that these differences are shaped by both structural and normative understandings about appropriate forms of care that cut across gender, class/socioeconomic status and race/migration. Overall, it argues that greater attention needs to be given to the way child care work in the private home is situated across ECEC and migration policy.

This thesis investigates how China's online activism intervenes in and transforms China's conventional media events. It takes the Spring Festival Gala, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the Wenzhou high-speed train collision as critical contexts to examine the interventional role of online activism in different types of media events in China. This thesis argues that, as an alternative medium of communication, the Internet has empowered some people to transform conventional media events into something more open, contentious, participatory and deliberative. The Internet hence constitutes an important interventional force which transforms the political life of the Chinese nation. Chapter One provides a conceptual discussion of media event theories and their critiques. Chapter Two takes a critical review of the Internet as an alternative media and of online activism as political communication. Chapter Three examines culture jamming as a mode of online activism in the context of a celebratory media event, the Spring Festival Gala. Lao Meng's Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala becomes a case study to examine how the shanzhai gala intervenes in CCTV's power-money dominated Spring Festival celebration. Chapter Four focuses on citizen journalism, as alternative crisis communication, in a disastrous media event—the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It examines three forms of citizen journalism in the aftermath of the earthquake: eyewitness reporting, online discussion and networking, and independent investigation. Chapter Five examines online weiguan as networked collective action in scandalous media events in China, as exemplified in the Wenzhou high-speed train crash. It discusses the concept, platform and practice of the online weiguan phenomenon. In the concluding chapter, this thesis proposes the analytical concept "Internet interventionism" as a way to summarise key arguments of the thesis. It argues that online activism provides opportunities to transform China's conventional media events into contested platforms and intervene in such platforms with new agency, agendas and voices. The Internet thus becomes a key site for such interventionism to take place. This has significant implications for how we re-conceptualise "media events" and envisage the future of the Chinese nation.

Disability support systems have undergone significant changes in contexts of rapid neoliberalisation. Services that were once provided or commissioned by the state are now increasingly delivered on an individual basis, through cash budgets and other forms of 'individualised funding' (IF). These changes have been driven by both state and non-state advocates of a greater role for markets in the provisioning of welfare, as well as significant sections of the disability rights movement. While these are widely recognised as part of a global process of market-oriented state restructuring, a lacuna exists in the critical literature in regard to the international diffusion of IF models. This study addresses this gap though a cross-national investigation of IF as an object of neoliberal policy mobility. The study traces the movement and mutation of IF in and between England, Scotland and Australia, and explains how and why it has proliferated in the ways that it has. I highlight IF's inherent spatial, relational and political character, and the ways it has moved and mutated between countries, deploying a policy mobilities approach as a theoretical point of departure. These themes are explored empirically through a methodology of following the policy through global networks and identifying the key players involved in its dissemination. To follow the policy, I developed a multi-site extended case study design, comprising three key sites of policy adaptation: England, Scotland and Australia. Through analysis of documentary materials and 30 semi-structured interviews with civil society actors, disability movement actors and policy makers, the thesis maps the spread of IF models through transnational networks. It highlights the ways in which networks actors themselves are embedded within, and conditioned by, global and national webs of norms, ideologies and structural constraints.The thesis finds that the variety of actors involved in the transnational diffusion of market-based models is much wider than is often acknowledged. In addition to state and commercial actors, social movements and transnational advocacy networks also play an important role in shaping and at times facilitating neoliberal policy mobility, even where this is not necessarily their intention. Such diffusion is always mediated by the national institutional contexts, political economies and path dependencies encountered, which modify the form, if not the substance, of IF regimes targeted at the disability sector.

Disability support systems have undergone significant changes in contexts of rapid neoliberalisation. Services that were once provided or commissioned by the state are now increasingly delivered on an individual basis, through cash budgets and other forms of 'individualised funding' (IF). These changes have been driven by both state and non-state advocates of a greater role for markets in the provisioning of welfare, as well as significant sections of the disability rights movement. While these are widely recognised as part of a global process of market-oriented state restructuring, a lacuna exists in the critical literature in regard to the international diffusion of IF models. This study addresses this gap though a cross-national investigation of IF as an object of neoliberal policy mobility. The study traces the movement and mutation of IF in and between England, Scotland and Australia, and explains how and why it has proliferated in the ways that it has. I highlight IF's inherent spatial, relational and political character, and the ways it has moved and mutated between countries, deploying a policy mobilities approach as a theoretical point of departure. These themes are explored empirically through a methodology of following the policy through global networks and identifying the key players involved in its dissemination. To follow the policy, I developed a multi-site extended case study design, comprising three key sites of policy adaptation: England, Scotland and Australia. Through analysis of documentary materials and 30 semi-structured interviews with civil society actors, disability movement actors and policy makers, the thesis maps the spread of IF models through transnational networks. It highlights the ways in which networks actors themselves are embedded within, and conditioned by, global and national webs of norms, ideologies and structural constraints.The thesis finds that the variety of actors involved in the transnational diffusion of market-based models is much wider than is often acknowledged. In addition to state and commercial actors, social movements and transnational advocacy networks also play an important role in shaping and at times facilitating neoliberal policy mobility, even where this is not necessarily their intention. Such diffusion is always mediated by the national institutional contexts, political economies and path dependencies encountered, which modify the form, if not the substance, of IF regimes targeted at the disability sector.